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Sunday, April 27, 2008

Kalene and Dan at Open Space here in Beacon gave me and over a hundred other artists plain canvas shopping bags to paint, cut, sew and otherwise manipulate for an exhibit and auction to benefit Clearwater, an environmental educational and advocacy organization in the Hudson Valley. Tote Bag, the exhibit which will run through May 3 , boasts a fun range of bags created by artists from all over the place, including many from Beacon, NYC, Brooklyn and handfuls from Chicago, Denver and more from across the US and Europe. Bags can be purchased online for $100.For my bag, I decided to dye my bag a dark color and create a contour riff of my ligature pieces using a white tub and tile silicone caulk - not a very green medium, but as it is a material I have to buy occasionally, it's a bit serves to repurpose and use up a surplus that I already had.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Greg Gunder has been documenting the erection of the various artist habitats/studios. Below is the video Greg shot as I began painting part of my structure. Greg's other habitat videos can be seen at his youtube channel, and at the Habitat for Artists blog.

More updated photos of my habitat over at Spire. I've rigged up a transparant roof, and temporarily blocked up some of the open areas just so I can get to using the space, and continue working on the structure at a more leisurely pace.

I'll be adding one more of the Garden Variety pieces to this facade, an arm that will protrude to support a hanging sculpture I'll be working on.

You can see the Habitats of Marnie Hillsley and Sara Mussen to the right of mine. We've got a regular village developing now.

A great silhouette cast on this face of the structure as the sun was sinking behind the hill.

Last week I was struck with a revelation that isn't so much a revelation as a realization, one which I've had in the past, but this time it was particularly profound. Once again, I found myself acutely aware of how valuable the Pythagorean Theorum has proven to be in my life. Not on a daily basis, but frequent enough (ie, more than once) to be surprising to me, and perhaps utterly nonshocking to my fifteen year old self. I remember being somewhat interested in the rational nature of the laws of geometry in high school, but I generally struggled with it as I recall. In general, my tolerance for math subjects was low, as was the bar I set for myself for achievement in those classes. It was thrilling when I was able to grasp a concept and solve a problem. So now, periodically, I experience that same sense of accomplishment in surmounting some logistical hurdle in some building a sculptural element in the studio, or as with last week, calculating the placement of two wall anchors from which a screen for a video projection was to hang, bisecting the corner of a gallery.

Greater self esteem through achievement in basic math. That's what it's all about. Even for an artist.

Looking back, I would never imagine the range of knowledge and skill sets that are drawn upon, however infrequently, in the practice of making my art. That's what I'd like to have been made aware of at the time - that those subjects I couldn't wait to get out of would have value in pursuing that one subject I felt I had a passion for.